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In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power

By William Powers
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 3, 2007; Page P01

Above the colonial rooftops of the Bolivian village of Samaipata crouches a jaguar-shaped temple. At 820 feet by 164 feet, the Incas’ easternmost fortress is the largest carved structure anywhere in the former South American empire.

Every June 21, on the Southern Hemisphere’s winter solstice, hundreds of Bolivians gather here for Aymara New Year — this year they’ll ring in 5515 and do what they’ve always done: Dance all night and then welcome daybreak with arms outstretched, their palms accepting the year’s first light.

Bolivia’s government wants to turn the country’s exceptionally wild beauty into cash, through ecotourism initiatives. (Andorinasamaipata.com)

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Recently, new hands stretch beside those of the Aymaras, the area’s original people, and the Quechuas, the descendants of the Incas: Germans, Dutch, French and Americans have come to celebrate. And a fair share of these -pardon me- gringos are not traveling through. They live here, under the jaguar temple, in quaint Samaipata.

Samaipata (Incan for “Rest in the Highlands”), where the eastern lowlands rise toward the western Andes, probably has more expatriate residents per capita than anywhere else in Bolivia, 100 or so in a town of 3,000.

One of them is Pieter de Raad, the blue-eyed founder of a hotel called La Vispera (“The Dawn”). He and his wife, Marga, are both psychologists in their 60s who traded in promising careers in Holland three decades ago for . . . Bolivia?

Hold on, but did you say Oblivia? Because that’s how obscure this place seems to most Westerners. Or at least it did before all hell broke loose five years ago and CNN began headlining thousands of women in bowler hats blockading the country’s highway system for months on end, as citizens called for the end of the corrupt clique of European descendants who had lorded over them for five centuries.

After that, Bolivia graduated in the world’s imagination from plain old obscure to obscure and possibly dangerous.

But something surprising came out of the turmoil. The protests ousted two unpopular presidents and led to the election of socialist coca farmer Evo Morales a year ago as the country’s first Indian president. And despite Morales’s anti-imperialist rhetoric since taking office such as his call for a possible new visa requirement for U.S. citizens visitors I’ve talked to here feel overwhelmingly welcome in their travels through the country.

“Everyone should visit Bolivia, especially Samaipata,” de Raad told me after he finished up a Chopin tune on his baby grand piano. A warm breeze from Amboro National Park blew across his organic acres. “It’s paradise.”

Cafe Society

A good place to begin exploring Samaipata is the Latina Cafe, a few blocks from the central square.

I arrived in the Latina to a blazing fireplace, the smell of grilling chorizo, the rhythms of the Parisian jazz group St. Germain and, along the long wooden bar, a half-dozen friends, Bolivians and expats alike.

Lots of backslapping, cheek-kissing and hugging. Nope, I was not new here. I first arrived 3 1/2 years ago as, of all things, a writer- in- residence. A Bolivian arts foundation had liked a book of mine and suited me up with an all-expense-paid four months in a house and studio. I was so charmed by “Wine?” Silvain asked me when I’d settled into a fireside table with a friend from New York. He’s the owner, a handsome 30-something Frenchman.

I named an inexpensive southern Bolivia merlot. Silvain eyeballed me for a full five seconds before commencing to wince. Then he was shaking his head feverishly and repeating the word “vinegar.”

Bolivia’s government wants to turn the country’s exceptionally wild beauty into cash, through ecotourism initiatives. (Andorinasamaipata.com)

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Bolivia: Find where to stay and how to get around from the article’s author.

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My friend whispered to me in English: “If the wine’s so awful, why’d he put it on his menu?”

The front door suddenly burst open, and in walked my 6-foot-3 German friend, Frank. He stuck a Camel cigarette in his mouth and called to Silvain for a cold Ducal.

“How about Huari?” Silvain suggested — and I had to admit that Huari is the better of the two Bolivian beers.

“Huari it is!” said Frank with his trademark little kid’s grin, his clothes still covered with dust from leading a two-day jeep tour. Frank owns the small, Samaipata-based tour company Roadrunners and was just back from the Che Guevara Trail.

The U.S. charity CARE inaugurated the trail a couple of years back; I drove it once in search of the Che legend. The museum in the remote La Higuera, where El Comandante was executed in 1967 by CIA-assisted Bolivian soldiers after a nine-month chase, is unremarkable. But it did prove fascinating to chat with the old folks in the city of Vallegrande who had known him. One woman let me touch a venerated lock of Che’s hair that she’d clipped while his corpse was on display behind the town’s hospital.

“Che was a loser,” piped up Olaf, a local Austrian, from the bar. “He only captured Samaipata for his pathetic asthma medicine.” Yes, Che and his comrades took this village only long enough to secure medicine from Samaipata’s pharmacy. (He paid for the drugs in full.) Guevara tried to bring socialism to Bolivia four decades too soon; it wouldn’t happen until 2006. Abandoned by local Communists and even Fidel Castro, he finally met his death in the seemingly endless Bolivian wilderness.

What’s Biodiversity Worth?

Twelve miles up a dirt road from Samaipata is the hamlet of La Yunga and Amboro National Park. I took a taxi up there the next morning to visit cloud forests packed with thousands of tree ferns.In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power
Among the giant ferns, you feel you’re on another planet. I bounced along on the spongy mosses under a multi-story canopy dotted with purple and phosphorescent pink orchids and bromeliads. The gnarled fern trees are 600 to 700 years old, and I half expected a mastodon to charge by. Our group’s guide, 25-year-old Fidel, explained that the foliage grows gradually because clouds blanket the area year-round, keeping everything damp and dimly lit.

Fidel pointed to jaguar tracks – fresh in the mud – and indicated the start of a three-day footpath to the San Rafael River and Devil’s Tooth mountain, an area chock-full of immense condors and the Andean speckled bear.

Bolivia’s government wants to turn the country’s exceptionally wild beauty into cash, through ecotourism initiatives. (Andorinasamaipata.com)

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Bolivia: Find where to stay and how to get around from the article’s author.

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These types of community-based eco-tourism initiatives are enough to make President Morales proud. His new economic plan calls for a hundred such ventures. “Broad-based growth,” wonkishly put, as opposed to growth concentrated in the hands of a few large soy, oil, timber and mining tycoons, as is now the order of the day in Bolivia.

The idea is to turn Bolivia’s exceptionally wild beauty into cash. The country has been declared one of the world’s select 10 “megadiverse” nations out of appreciation for its dense mountains, compact valleys, yawning salt flats and low-lying tropical forests, and the variety of species inhabiting them. The single park of Amboro, for example, contains more biodiversity than all of Costa Rica.

Quechuas like Fidel can only do so much to fulfill this eco-egalitarian dream, because they speak only Spanish (in addition to Quechua). Morales’s government knows that expatriates — precisely the motley bunch living in Samaipata are indispensable to attract visitors who no habla español or whose passion for bird-watching requires local guides with special expertise.

Take Michael Blendinger, a trilingual Argentine ornithologist whom we passed on the trail. Leading a group of Canadian aficionados, he stopped to greet Fidel and me. His Samaipata-based agency brings business to La Yunga and Fidel and the locals love him for it.

But Blendinger, Fidel and I discussed a growing threat: Land-hungry settlers from Bolivia’s interior are slashing and burning their way toward the giant ferns to plant corn and raise cattle. Central government eco-plans can do little to stop them unless the economics work: The dollar value of the landscape for tourism has to outweigh its value for agriculture.

As the advancing settlers organize their slash-and-burn forays, the only credible counterforce comes from a dozen communities benefiting from ecotourism around the park, who, with the help of their expat allies, pressure local government to use policy and force to hold back the new settlers.

“If it pays, it stays,” Blendinger said, referring to the tree ferns. “If not, this is charcoal.”

Welcome to the Jungle

The relationship between locals and expats in Samaipata runs deeper than quid pro quo.

I found myself relaxing one evening in Samaipata’s answer to the Hard Rock Cafe, a bar called Mosquito, beside Georg, the German owner of the Landhaus Hotel. Decades back, Georg settled here and proceeded to take in about 10 hard-to-adopt children from several Bolivian orphanages.

One of them, Juan, is now an adult who tends bar at Mosquito. He has the dark skin and double-folded eyelids of a Quechua. Juan handed me a cold Huari before scooting over to a table to schmooze with some travelers.

In Bolivia, a Village With Real Staying Power
I took in the ambiance. Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” filled a room draped in ’70s and ’80s rock memorabilia. One of Georg’s biological sons, the hulking Sven, is slouched over a beer, properly sloshed. Mosquito is Sven’s brainchild. The 38-year-old is rumored to have been Michael Jackson’s bodyguard before returning to the tranquillity of Samaipata.

Proud dad of so many, Georg bade us farewell. Shortly thereafter, Sven’s head hit the table with a thud heard even above a Jimi Hendrix solo. Juan started telling me about their family get-togethers, a kind of United Nations in miniature. “We all call him ‘Dad,’ ” Juan said of Georg, “and we love him.”

For Love and Money

Bolivia’s government wants to turn the country’s exceptionally wild beauty into cash, through ecotourism initiatives. (Andorinasamaipata.com)

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Bolivia: Find where to stay and how to get around from the article’s author.

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If you ask the expats why they’ve settled in the town beneath the giant ferns, they’ll talk of love. Frank married a woman from nearby Santa Cruz named Marifé; Silvain, the stunning local Samaipateña, Lenny. And there’s Gerlinde, a German woman who runs a progressive kindergarten here. Like many others, she was just passing through when she hitched up with a Bolivian man. She never left.

Newcomers continue to arrive, among the most recent a jovial 50-something Texan, Trent, who married a Cochabambina. I talked to him and his wife, Rosario (who gives private Spanish classes in the village for $5 an hour), under the freshly painted sign of their new business: “Bolivian Romance B&B.” They told me the place has been so popular they have opened another one on the far side of town.

If love is one draw, money is the other. Not needing much of it, that is. Bolivia boasts one of the lowest costs of living in South America. Roadrunners’ Frank told me he “lives like a king” on $500 a month. (A typical Bolivian in Samaipata might spend one-fifth that sum.) He said he feels free in Samaipata, working just a few days a week to more than adequately support his wife and three children.

Despite a Samaipata real estate boomlet after the Morales victory, as new luxury houses spring up and prices have risen 30 percent, land remains a bargain. Some Dutch retirees I met here calculated that they could sell their middle-class home in the Netherlands and buy some 30 homes of equal size in Bolivia.

Moving On, or Not
Samaipata may not detain you for as long as it did me. A week is more than sufficient to camp in the La Yunga fern forests, bathe under the Pacha or Cuevas waterfalls, sample the town’s unique cultural blend, maybe even stretch your palms out to greet the new year’s sun amid Inca ruins.

Then it will be time to move on to Bolivia’s other marvels: the white city of Sucre, the otherworldly pink and red lakes of the Uyuni salt flats, and Titicaca’s Island of the Sun. Yes, time to move on.

But, then again, who knows? I reflected on my last evening in Samaipata, as Pieter played the final notes of a Mahler piece. After all, many others who came before you were just passing through.

William Powers is author of the memoir “Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontline Chronicle From Bolivia’s War on Globalization” (Bloomsbury).